Sadly it applies to Tory donors only and is called a vip Ppe contract.
As someone pointed out in the article, the system is designed to fail people. Did nobody from the party tell their think tank this before they wasted money investigating the blindingly obvious?
They could do this very easily right now with minimal changes.
Scrap unemployment benefits and the sanctions and admin of having to constantly attend the job centre. Replace it with a “minimum income”. Have people register over the phone or online. No attending the job centre constantly to prove you’re looking for work, just pay them the money.
And we know it would work because that’s exactly how it did work during lockdown.
The only question after that is what to do with all the old job centre staff.
HMRC seem to be understaffed these days. Lets re-train them to go after tax cheats.
So an economic system that has become so corrupt, so consolidated into serving the interests of a small but highly influential percentage of the population, is now so broken that it needs to be propped up because the majority of people cannot afford to exist within it, while maintaining the infinite growth model of endless consumption of tat designed to be thrown away and replaced with next year’s shiny shiny.
Oceans filled with plastic instead of life, sweat shops and slave labour in the supply chains, artificial scarcity to drive up prices, explosion of food banks, public services so underfunded they are filled with people doing the equivalent of two jobs, privatisation of profits and public subsidies for the losses, People unable to afford a home of their own, an incompetent and out of touch government pandering to donors instead of people and country. Energy crisis, public health crisis, environmental crisis, cost of existence crisis etc etc.
Maybe we need to rethink the socioeconomic model, rather than find ways to keep this self destructive nonsense going.
It’s quite satisfying that even Tory think tanks are concluding, with their own data, that Tory policy is senseless and breaking everything.
Quick! If we don’t let some scraps fall from our table the plebs might get uppity. They’re not suggesting this to help anyone, they’re suggesting it because otherwise the grift may come to an end.
If nobody but a handful of people have any disposable income we can’t continue the economic system as it is…….
When billionaires, huge corporations and now a Tory think tank are pointing out there’s a fucking huge cliff ahead because the models broken maybe we should look at the model.
Forget climate change and corruption and all the rest. The model is now so broken that without intervention such as a basic income the consumer model will collapse irreparably.
We spent so long funnelling everything upwards to a tiny handful of people and businesses that there’s no longer enough to feed this economic beast and it’s going to starve….
This is basically a reformed Universal Credit model lol
What’s the difference between this and Universal Basic Income?
Basically the state pension but for all ages, what could go wrong?
Talk of ‘minimum income’ is just so there won’t be major socio-economic changes to the UK.
I would say they are a tad late in noticing the threat to the status quo…
If it’s decent enough for food and housing, I’d quit my job for this. My lifestyle isn’t really expensive so a minimum wage that covers necessities would incentive me not working. Hope many people don’t think the same as me or we would have decreasing economic activity and no workers.
I don’t know what these think tanks do?
Are they paid to come to a room for 40 hours a week for months to come up with obvious solutions?
Or are they volunteers that meet via zoom a couple times and that’s it?
Poor folk put 100 % of income, straight back into the economy. UBI, minimum income ect, are all ways of perpetually feeding the current system.
At present moment, Universal Credit and the benefit system is designed to penalise the claimant.
Self Employment:
If for example you wanted to try self employment, we all know it takes time to get going, under the present system you have a maximum 12 months of support before you are then on your own, if you are not making enough of a profit by then to cover your wages you get no support because of the ceiling cap.
So anyone that is claiming is put off trying to get something going because of the huge risks.
Education:
Some colleges do have certain courses that go up to a level 2 that can be done part time for free if you are on certain benefits like UC, but, say you are 90% of the way through that course and a job comes up, you are forced to quit the course and take that job, if you don’t then you are sanctioned.
If any good opportunities come up as the job centre likes to call them, aka the restart scheme and other stuff, if it is mandatory you have to do it regardless, and a lot of these Level 2 courses are mainly all homework based, so you end up doing job searching, the good opportunity scheme and college at same time, very little time to get your studies done to pass it.
If you manage to get your level 2 in something, then you are looking at loans for level 3 upwads, now a lot of people think you can just get an advanced loan from the college to cover everything, but that ain’t true.
The advanced loan only covers so much, after that you end up having to look to personal loans to cover rent and stuff if you live alone in a rented place, I know because I wanted to get into my level 3 AAT accounting and it was just not viable.
So, people say that claimants are lazy and scroungers, but the system works against them if they try to do something to get out of it.
My solution would be:
If we had a universal income or whatever they want to call it, then for 16 hours a week everyone has to do something, be it volunteering, college, helping their community in some way, help to start something up business wise or job searching.
Remove all the barriers and then help with the fees, let people have the chance to better themselves and get out of the system and a huge majority would.
A great test for a real leader of the country would be implementing this sort of policy with widespread political support.
If the Tories did this I would think maybe they can ‘rehabilitate’ themselves to as much an extent as they can. This country is conservative, it would be great if the party really took they seriously.
Can’t see it happening in a million years.
This article title is rubbish yet again. Do they want to set out a minimum income any worker could be paid? Do they call for all businesses to be paying as minimum income as possible without them striking?
I am massively in favour of a small minimum income/UBI. A minimum income or UBI is not incompatible with top up benefits for sickness, PIP, or job seeking incentivisation schemes. All a minimum income is saying is “Are you a British Citizen? Yes? Then here’s a basic amount of money to allow you to survive that is guaranteed to be put into your bank account at the end of every month.” That shouldn’t be controversial in 2023. It’s the safety net everyone is entitled to.
Who is going to fund it? Sod benefit claimants. Any and all extra cash should be going to the NHS where it is needed.
Tory think tank?
Powered by bullshit and has the tracks mounted on top of the gun
You cannot have a functioning economy when people have no money to spend. When you have people needing to use food banks and warm banks because they cannot even afford the basics, you won’t have a strong economy for long. It will become even weaker when so many middle class people are being squeezed and are cutting back on luxuries. Paying people more and taxing the super-rich and companies more will do a lot more to revive the economy than continuing to pay the working class the bare minimum.
And in response.. “The government is currently considering options to reform the welfare system to encourage more people back into employment.” Same old Same old.
There’s a larger population, more automation.. we don’t *need* everyone to work for society to function.
In the 1950s they put forward a bright future where machinery meant everyone could persue creative pursuits. What actually happened was as work became less available people were threatened with starvation unless they did more and more menial work for low pay. All cheered on by the tabloids.
This is a rehash of the “Negative Income Tax” of Monetarist Milton Friedman from the 1960s: essentially, tinkering with a broken system. It repeatedly surfaces as a way to poison the well for Universal Basic Income – which is a far superior idea that enables innovation, job creation, and a range of work that is uneconomical to do under Employment Contracts. The big problem for Big Blue, and other Right Wing Think Tanks, is that Universal Basic Income gives people the ability to walk away from a bad job without the Employer being able to do anything about it. Hence the need to tinker with the benefits system. Universal Credit is designed to fail people. This is not really a contentious statement: just read the design documents from the period 2005-2015. The whole point of UC is to move people off benefits. It does not address the reason why people are on benefits in the first place. This is just the latest round of that whitewashing of pandering to appallingly bad employers.
23 comments
Sadly it applies to Tory donors only and is called a vip Ppe contract.
As someone pointed out in the article, the system is designed to fail people. Did nobody from the party tell their think tank this before they wasted money investigating the blindingly obvious?
They could do this very easily right now with minimal changes.
Scrap unemployment benefits and the sanctions and admin of having to constantly attend the job centre. Replace it with a “minimum income”. Have people register over the phone or online. No attending the job centre constantly to prove you’re looking for work, just pay them the money.
And we know it would work because that’s exactly how it did work during lockdown.
The only question after that is what to do with all the old job centre staff.
HMRC seem to be understaffed these days. Lets re-train them to go after tax cheats.
So an economic system that has become so corrupt, so consolidated into serving the interests of a small but highly influential percentage of the population, is now so broken that it needs to be propped up because the majority of people cannot afford to exist within it, while maintaining the infinite growth model of endless consumption of tat designed to be thrown away and replaced with next year’s shiny shiny.
Oceans filled with plastic instead of life, sweat shops and slave labour in the supply chains, artificial scarcity to drive up prices, explosion of food banks, public services so underfunded they are filled with people doing the equivalent of two jobs, privatisation of profits and public subsidies for the losses, People unable to afford a home of their own, an incompetent and out of touch government pandering to donors instead of people and country. Energy crisis, public health crisis, environmental crisis, cost of existence crisis etc etc.
Maybe we need to rethink the socioeconomic model, rather than find ways to keep this self destructive nonsense going.
It’s quite satisfying that even Tory think tanks are concluding, with their own data, that Tory policy is senseless and breaking everything.
Quick! If we don’t let some scraps fall from our table the plebs might get uppity. They’re not suggesting this to help anyone, they’re suggesting it because otherwise the grift may come to an end.
If nobody but a handful of people have any disposable income we can’t continue the economic system as it is…….
When billionaires, huge corporations and now a Tory think tank are pointing out there’s a fucking huge cliff ahead because the models broken maybe we should look at the model.
Forget climate change and corruption and all the rest. The model is now so broken that without intervention such as a basic income the consumer model will collapse irreparably.
We spent so long funnelling everything upwards to a tiny handful of people and businesses that there’s no longer enough to feed this economic beast and it’s going to starve….
This is basically a reformed Universal Credit model lol
What’s the difference between this and Universal Basic Income?
Basically the state pension but for all ages, what could go wrong?
Talk of ‘minimum income’ is just so there won’t be major socio-economic changes to the UK.
I would say they are a tad late in noticing the threat to the status quo…
If it’s decent enough for food and housing, I’d quit my job for this. My lifestyle isn’t really expensive so a minimum wage that covers necessities would incentive me not working. Hope many people don’t think the same as me or we would have decreasing economic activity and no workers.
I don’t know what these think tanks do?
Are they paid to come to a room for 40 hours a week for months to come up with obvious solutions?
Or are they volunteers that meet via zoom a couple times and that’s it?
Poor folk put 100 % of income, straight back into the economy. UBI, minimum income ect, are all ways of perpetually feeding the current system.
At present moment, Universal Credit and the benefit system is designed to penalise the claimant.
Self Employment:
If for example you wanted to try self employment, we all know it takes time to get going, under the present system you have a maximum 12 months of support before you are then on your own, if you are not making enough of a profit by then to cover your wages you get no support because of the ceiling cap.
So anyone that is claiming is put off trying to get something going because of the huge risks.
Education:
Some colleges do have certain courses that go up to a level 2 that can be done part time for free if you are on certain benefits like UC, but, say you are 90% of the way through that course and a job comes up, you are forced to quit the course and take that job, if you don’t then you are sanctioned.
If any good opportunities come up as the job centre likes to call them, aka the restart scheme and other stuff, if it is mandatory you have to do it regardless, and a lot of these Level 2 courses are mainly all homework based, so you end up doing job searching, the good opportunity scheme and college at same time, very little time to get your studies done to pass it.
If you manage to get your level 2 in something, then you are looking at loans for level 3 upwads, now a lot of people think you can just get an advanced loan from the college to cover everything, but that ain’t true.
The advanced loan only covers so much, after that you end up having to look to personal loans to cover rent and stuff if you live alone in a rented place, I know because I wanted to get into my level 3 AAT accounting and it was just not viable.
So, people say that claimants are lazy and scroungers, but the system works against them if they try to do something to get out of it.
My solution would be:
If we had a universal income or whatever they want to call it, then for 16 hours a week everyone has to do something, be it volunteering, college, helping their community in some way, help to start something up business wise or job searching.
Remove all the barriers and then help with the fees, let people have the chance to better themselves and get out of the system and a huge majority would.
A great test for a real leader of the country would be implementing this sort of policy with widespread political support.
If the Tories did this I would think maybe they can ‘rehabilitate’ themselves to as much an extent as they can. This country is conservative, it would be great if the party really took they seriously.
Can’t see it happening in a million years.
This article title is rubbish yet again. Do they want to set out a minimum income any worker could be paid? Do they call for all businesses to be paying as minimum income as possible without them striking?
I am massively in favour of a small minimum income/UBI. A minimum income or UBI is not incompatible with top up benefits for sickness, PIP, or job seeking incentivisation schemes. All a minimum income is saying is “Are you a British Citizen? Yes? Then here’s a basic amount of money to allow you to survive that is guaranteed to be put into your bank account at the end of every month.” That shouldn’t be controversial in 2023. It’s the safety net everyone is entitled to.
Who is going to fund it? Sod benefit claimants. Any and all extra cash should be going to the NHS where it is needed.
Tory think tank?
Powered by bullshit and has the tracks mounted on top of the gun
You cannot have a functioning economy when people have no money to spend. When you have people needing to use food banks and warm banks because they cannot even afford the basics, you won’t have a strong economy for long. It will become even weaker when so many middle class people are being squeezed and are cutting back on luxuries. Paying people more and taxing the super-rich and companies more will do a lot more to revive the economy than continuing to pay the working class the bare minimum.
And in response.. “The government is currently considering options to reform the welfare system to encourage more people back into employment.” Same old Same old.
There’s a larger population, more automation.. we don’t *need* everyone to work for society to function.
In the 1950s they put forward a bright future where machinery meant everyone could persue creative pursuits. What actually happened was as work became less available people were threatened with starvation unless they did more and more menial work for low pay. All cheered on by the tabloids.
This is a rehash of the “Negative Income Tax” of Monetarist Milton Friedman from the 1960s: essentially, tinkering with a broken system. It repeatedly surfaces as a way to poison the well for Universal Basic Income – which is a far superior idea that enables innovation, job creation, and a range of work that is uneconomical to do under Employment Contracts. The big problem for Big Blue, and other Right Wing Think Tanks, is that Universal Basic Income gives people the ability to walk away from a bad job without the Employer being able to do anything about it. Hence the need to tinker with the benefits system. Universal Credit is designed to fail people. This is not really a contentious statement: just read the design documents from the period 2005-2015. The whole point of UC is to move people off benefits. It does not address the reason why people are on benefits in the first place. This is just the latest round of that whitewashing of pandering to appallingly bad employers.